After precious little sleep Thursday night, co-founder Matt Dennewitz and I pressed go on BeerGraphs Friday. Hoping to use big data to say big things about beer, we’re set to go on a statistical journey into the heart of suds. I feel like numbers don’t ruin our favorite adult sodas, they help us understand ourselves better. With leaderboards, a statistical, scientific and policy blog called BeerGraphs and a more writerly and celebratory blog called BarelyBeer, I’ll be plenty busy.

But I’ll also be writing about baseball, of course.

I took a long look at Matt Cain. With help from him and plenty of people around the park, I tried out each theory until I found a mechanical issue and a statistical issue that might be the cause of his struggles. I wouldn’t know how to fix it, but I think I can help spot it.

5 Responses to BeerGraphs Is Here Base Ball

This is off topic, but I don’t know who else to ask: why in the world does interleague play have to be all year long? I understand that with the reallignment there need to be a few more interleague games, but why can’t they just be squeezed into a slightly longer midseason interleague period, say, three weeks instead of two, or whatever it was? Everyone says it’s mathematically impossible without ever explaining why. Is this just a scheme by Selig to force the DH on the National League?

Because there are now fifteen teams in each league. If we had ‘interleague’ and ‘non-interleague’ play, a team would be forced to take a series off every series. Seven play seven and one sits for three days? Doesn’t work.

I must not be mathematical enough, because I still don’t get it. If all 15 NL teams play all 15 AL teams 2 games each, that is 30 interleague games per team, or 5 weeks of baseball. Anything less than 15×15 is arbitrary. If each team in one division plays each team in another division 3 games apiece, that is 15 games per team, or a little less than 3 weeks. If each NL team is paired with another AL team at the same time, how is anybody sitting? Two and a half weeks of interleague leading into the All-Star break would be charming- this is just lame.